Jerry Garcia interview with former banjo student Randy Groenke and Mike Cramer
Grateful Dead House
710 Ashbury Street
San Francisco, CA
February or early March 1967

This is a tagged version of shnid: 89961

Lots of interesting early 1967 Jerry talk from a low gen. cassette – exact lineage unknown but 2nd or 3rd generation at the most. Very good to excellent sound quality – check the sample to decide for yourself. I looked on the web for information about this interview but could not find any details. The probable date is because their first album was about to be released, but hadn’t been yet. (The release date for the first album was March 17, 1967.)

Besides Jerry and the interviewers, there are bits of Mountain Girl, Bob Weir, Pigpen and others in the background.

disc 1 – 42:02
01 [4:05] electric banjo, pedal steel guitar, music equipment talk, etc.
02 [1:44] Jefferson Airplane, Jerry assisting on Surrealistic Pillow LP
03 [2:51] The San Francisco Sound
04 [4:22] hippies, Grateful Dead view of music, etc.
05 [5:06] The Fillmore audience
06 [3:02] talk about Newsweek article, “Dropouts With A Mission” and Jerry seeing himself as a dropout
07 [1:49] Jerry discusses precursors to the S.F. scene and switching from banjo back to guitar
08 [3:47] rock and roll influences (Chuck Berry, The Beatles, etc.), becoming successful while sharing with their friends, etc.
09 [4:55] the Vietnam War
10 [1:21] “the world needs to take care of itself”
11 [1:26] Grateful Dead music not advocating any political message
12 [0:52] looking forward to first trip to New York
13 [1:34] Buffalo Springfield, Moby Grape, Skip Spence, Jorma Kaukonen
14 [0:54] Mathew Katz and other old style band managers
15 [3:16] S.F. radio and the radio business
16 [0:58] Jerry’s short review and hopes for the success of their not yet released first album

disc 2 – 41:08
01 [1:02] what might happen to the S.F. scene, etc.
02 [0:55] talk about some band equipment which had just been stolen from their warehouse
03 [4:16] the Haight Ashbury scene
04 [4:34] The Hell’s Angels
05 [0:59] the stolen band equipment has been found!
06 [3:51] more Hell’s Angels talk
07 [3:30] Jerry’s beliefs
08 [1:00] The police
09 [4:53] drugs
10 [3:38] Jerry’s tapes – “go get them from Sara”
11 [3:34] possibility of playing banjo with The Grateful Dead > kids talking much louder than Jerry [luckily there’s not too much of that]
12 [1:07] existentialism
13 [1:23] “Blow Up” film and Grateful Dead plans to be in a movie
14 [1:52] Look magazine article on Jefferson Airplane with Jim Marshall photos of the S.F. bands
15 [1:12] jazz and other styles mixing with Rock and Roll
16 [1:04] talk about getting the stolen band equipment back
17 [1:27] talk about the old gun that Jerry is playing around with during the interview
18 [0:51] interview conclusion

lineage: master reel @ 3.75 ips speed > (?) > cassette > my TDK MA90 cassette > Nakamichi Dragon > Macintosh with Digidesign AudioMedia III sound card > Pro Tools (minor “nip and tuck” edits, normalization and many clicks and pops manually removed – no noise reduction or equalization) > AIFF > xACT (Flac level 8 files with sector boundaries verified). md5 file created with checkSUM+.

More notes from a comment posted after this was seeded:

Blair Jackson wrote the following about this interview: “This interview was done at 710 Ashbury in February or March of 1967 … Randy Groenke, the principal interviewer, had been a banjo student of Garcia’s in the early 60s when they both lived in the South Bay. He and his friend Mike Cramer simply called Jerry up and arranged to do the interview, friend to friend.”

“One Afternoon Long Ago … An Interview with Jerry Garcia, 1967,” by Randy Groenke and Mike Cramer. First published in The Golden Road magazine and reprinted in Herb Greene, Dead Days: A Grateful Dead Illustrated History (Petaluma, CA: Acid Test Productions, 1997).

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